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Linguistic nativism is the hypothesis that humans are born with some knowledge of language. It is intended as an explanation for the fact that children are reliably able to accurately acquire enormously complex linguistic structures within a short period of time. [3] The central argument in favour of nativism is the poverty of the stimulus.
The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or "innate facility" for acquiring language.
For example, nativism was at least partially motivated by the perception that statistical inferences made from experience were insufficient to account for the complex languages humans develop. In part, this was a reaction to the failure of behaviorism and behaviorist models of the era to easily account for how something as complex and ...
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky.The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be.
To Chomsky, nativism resolves Plato's Problem of how babies acquire knowledge of language that exceeds their experience. [ 1 ] The book covers, in its first edition, government and binding theory , X-bar theory , theta role , movement , second-language acquisition (SLA). [ 1 ]
One strategy that occurs during nativization is the extension of a source language’s grammatical, phonological, syntactic and semantic features. [1] Unlike erroneous overgeneralizing of grammatical rules, it has been found that such instances of overgeneralization in the process of nativization are an extension of processes that are found in well-established varieties of English.
Many critics have argued against the convincingness of the PoS argument, stating that Chomsky's theory is vague, incoherent and untestable. [9] Therefore, debate still remains about the extent to which language learning is an innate, domain-specific process.
Nativism may refer to: Nativism (politics), ethnocentric beliefs relating to immigration and nationalism; Nativism (psychology), a concept in psychology and philosophy which asserts certain concepts are "native" or in the brain at birth; Linguistic nativism, a theory that grammar is largely hard-wired into the brain